Hm. Max Brooks’s World War Z (wiki) is a very good, very entertaining book. (As I am a Finn, this is equivalent to an American going “The best work of human hands ever! The slam-dunk of the century!”)
Now there’ll be a movie out of it.
When I first heard that, I thought: Oh boy. Could be really, really good — flash after flash of various stages of zombie carnage and human savagery. Piece after unrelated piece that together illustrate the fall, agony and recovery of our civilization when the dead walk.
Then I thought: Nah. They’ll never succeed. They’ll conjure up a main character. The book has none, you see, except a very discreet, almost invisible ”collector” of the various oral stories that make up the book. Once they have a heroic character team, they’ll show them running around some corner of America with shotguns and screaming “Leave me! Okay, you saved me! Oh, heroic self-sacrifice time!”; then there’ll be a romantic interest and a comedic sidekick, and then it’s finger-eyesocket time.
Now, however, I’ve learned something new: the person writing the screenplay is J. Michael Straczynski.
If you had no reaction to that — well, you know Babylon 5, the sci-fi television series? The, um, best sci-fi and maybe best television series ever? Well, that was Straczynski’s baby. That was what he can do.
And you remember the slightly more recent movie Changeling? Straczynski screenplayed that, and it was just beautiful. It even included a shower scene with a naked Angelina Jolie that was absolutely un-arousing. One needs some serious gifts to write that. (I jest.)
So now — well, now I’m just telling myself: This could very well be one of the best things ever —
Sorry. Almost got into the American habit of over-exaggeration there.
This could be something very, very good. I’ll even swallow a main character, a protagonist (being an idiot, I don’t see why the film’d need one, but apparently there is a reason) — but if there’s a love interest, then by the empty heavens I’ll shamble out of the theater angrier and more menacing than any zombie on the screen.
Though just as glassy-eyed if the said interest is Angelina Jolie.
